Editor’s Note: This is an article solely about the New York Times and not about American news media in general. In our opinion, the Indian bureaus of Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have been far more balanced than the New York Times. Specifically we highlight the balance displayed by Rama Lakshmi of Wash-Post and Paul Beckett of WSJ. Ms. Lakshmi, we recall, actually mentioned the outrageous comments about women by an Italian priest to make the point that maltreatment of women is a global issue and not exclusively Indian. Kudos to both Rama Lakshmi and Paul Beckett.
The rape-murder of a 23-year old Indian student in Delhi was one of the more horrific incidents India has witnessed. That and the chilling indifference of the Delhi Law & Order machinery shocked that nation and the world. Unfortunately, this act also released the inner demagoguery among many. That is to be expected and tolerated at a time like this. Emotions are running high and rightly so.
But we draw the line at demagoguery by the professional journalistic community, especially organizations that are considered among the elite of global journalism. We speak specifically of an editorial in The New York Times, that proclaimed bastion of “all that is fit to print”.
The NYT editorial on December 28, 2012 began with:
- The brutal gang rape of a young woman in New Delhi this month has cast a cold light on how badly India treats its women.
The editorial ended with the arrogant, contemptuous declaration:
- India, a rising economic power and the world’s largest democracy, can never reach its full potential if half its population lives in fear of unspeakable violence.
Prima facie, these sentiments appear sensible if trifle overstated. Until you compare the horrific Delhi incident to even a more gruesome, more terrifying incident.
We speak, of course, of the massacre of 26 people, 20 of whom were 5-10 year old children, by a gunman in Newtown, CT. With respect, we think the Newtown massacre was far far worse than the Delhi rape-murder. And this is not an isolated incident. Killing of school children in America has been in the news since the horrible murder of 12 children in 1999 in Columbine, Colorado.
Guns, violence and death in schools is a nationwide issue in America. But the New York Times has never, to our recollection, made this an issue about America’s children. Does any one recall a New York Times editorial arguing:
- The horrific murder of young children in Newtown has cast a cold light on how badly America treats its children?
Has any NYT editorial ever made an arrogant, contemptuous declaration that:
- America, the world’s most powerful democracy, can never reach its full potential if its young, its future, lives in fear of unspeakable violence and death?
We don’t think so. Because, the NYT will never have the gall or the guts to publicly blame the American people for the unspeakable violence in American schools. If they did, they would be figuratively run out of town.
Instead, the New York Times focused on the easy availability of guns. In other words, the NYT treated the massacre of school children in Newtown as essentially a Law & Order problem, one that can be solved by sensible regulation.
But guns don’t kill, people do. So the New York Times could easily have made Newtown massacre an issue of American culture, of the American love of guns & violence, and of the innate mentality of the American male. But they did not. Instead, they covered the the state of mind of the accused, Adam Lanza. They analyzed his prior behavior. They reported on Mr. Lanza’s mother, his brother.
Contrast this with the New York Times coverage of the rape-murder in Delhi. There is not even a
trace of coverage of the men who are accused of raping and brutally killing the Delhi woman, no
discussion of their backgrounds, how the six accused got together, nothing whatsoever that seeks to understand their state of mind. Such coverage would have meant treating the Delhi rape-murder as a single act of a savage demented band of killers. That obviously was not where the New York Times wanted to go.
Why the difference
between the coverage of the murders in Newtown & Delhi? Is it simply
because the NYT wanted to portray the American killer as an isolated
crazy while they wanted to portray the Delhi rapists-killers as symptomatic of Indian culture? Absolutely in our opinion.
Witness the sanctimonious lecture of the New York Times editorial:
- More broadly, India must work on changing a culture in which women are routinely devalued.
Frankly, we believe that the New York Times has contempt for the culture of core America as well. But they won’t dare express those sentiments. Because the American people won’t tolerate that garbage and because America has a large community of conservative writers and TV hosts who will flay the New York Times for such defamation.
In contrast, the New York Times feels rapaciously free to express its demagoguery about Indian culture because the Indian media does not have a Bill O’Reilly, a Sean Hannity or anybody remotely similar. Unfortunately, Indian media is a supine community laboring under a colonial inferiority complex. So they, like the rest of Indian society, whisper their anger about the “gora” (“white”) journalists in hushed private conversations.
PS: We will address the “cultural issue” of rape and treatment of women in India in an article next week.
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